Fat People Die Sooner, Right?

Reading Michelle’s post on death (cached here if you can’t read it on her site)   got me thinking.

How else on earth could you explain a doctor expressing anger and blame at someone for accidentally dying? And to then vent that anger on his grieving wife? You couldn’t. There was no other explanation but the fear of death, utilizing the Just-world Hypothesis as its conduit.

Fortunately that didn’t happen to me when either parent died.  My mother, who died at age 74, reached the point with Parkinson’s and Lewy body dementia where she could no longer eat or drink.  My father died of a heart attack brought on by severe anemia related to bladder cancer.  He was 77.

My mother was fat for most of her life.  My father was thin for most of his.  Neither died due to a health problem for which fat or thin is a specific risk.  My father smoked for decades, which increases bladder cancer risk — but smoking isn’t the only risk factor.

Sometimes it’s not about fat.

---

A few related links:

Age is the number one risk factor for dying. My folks were born in the early 1930s. According to the US SSA (Figure 2a) my mother’s life expectancy at birth was  60 years — and my father’s was less.

My mother also struggled with diabetes and depression, both of which increase death risk.

Longer-lived parents tend to have longer-lived children. It’s like it’s genetic or something.

QOTD: Dealing with family

Because I don’t engage in fat hating comments or conversations I really just feel more and more like the black sheep from the family. Many of my family members have undergone bariatric surgery so the stress between them and myself is even worse. I have had one cousin who is a lot older than me tell me how proud she is of me for the work I am doing, but my aunt who is her mother left the room during the conversation because she acts like this portion of my life doesn’t exist to her.

— Amanda Levitt, quoted at Fat and the Ivy

Thankful Thursday

[an occasional exercise in gratitude]

1. The man of the house is no longer in the hospital with a 104F (40C) fever.  (That…was scary.)

2. My new job has better health insurance than we had previously. (I’d prefer a single-payer solution, but it’s what I’ve got.)

3. Hospice care is providing more monitoring for my father to help avoid surprises and ER visits — and they come to HIM, which is much better than ambulances.

4. My father is happy in the care home where he lives and is getting good care.

5. Supportive friends and chosen family, for helping me to stay sane.

 

Parents

It is beginning to sink in that my father is dying.  My mother died nearly 6 years ago, so I’ve been managing his finances and meeting with doctors and such.

A large part of me feels numb.

I’ve written before that I didn’t have the best relationship with my parents as an adult.  Part of this was due to my fat, though that certainly wasn’t the only issue.   In the past couple years I’ve gone from seeing my father a few times a year to seeing him once a week or more.  He seems to feel that he’s very close to me.  I see him as an amiable relative who is slipping away.  It’s also a loss, both of what was, and a reminder of what could have been.

I should note that I’m not sure I can have a full, two-sided relationship with someone with dementia.  Partly it’s the memory loss (he’s asked me to visit at least once a month, and I explained I’ve been visiting once a week).  He is dependent on me, in many ways, and that affects things.  I’m not looking for the relationship I didn’t have 20 years ago, because that’s not possible now.  But I am reminded of the relationship we could have had 20 or 30 years ago.

This isn’t just my regrets, or my loss of a parent.  He made his own choices.  It’s very possible that his dementia is due to his longterm drinking. I know his drinking affected our relationship, and my relationship with my mother, same as I know their wanting me to be thin affected me and my relationship with my parents.

I realize these may not be the typical feelings at facing the eventual loss of a parent.  But there it is.

Waiting

I am waiting outside a medical supply store that’s closed for lunch.

Why?

To pick up some catheter supplies for my dad.

Yes, my life is so glamorous. :/

For All The Parents Out There…

Think about how you will react if your child is fat.  Over time, if you’re making it clear that you don’t want a fat son or daughter, well, your son or daughter may not be able to stop being fat.  But your son or daughter can eventually choose to stop being your son or daughter.  Imagine your adult child building a life with people who aren’t nagging about weight loss, or who can enjoy doing something physical without making it about weight loss, or who can eat a meal without it being about weight loss.  Calling home?  Not required.  Spending time together?  Optional.  Listening to lame weight jokes?  Optional.

There are certainly other issues that can cause this sort of distrust.  It didn’t help that my parents’ reaction to my dating a woman was insist I not tell any other family members and then studiously not  want to talk about her much less meet her.  It didn’t help that my father drank large amounts of beer daily for the first 20 or 21 years of their marriage.   A lot of things didn’t help.   But it’s generally expected that drinking or rejecting a child’s sexuality is going to be harmful to the relationship.  Giving kids shit for being fat is practically a requirement of “good parenting” these days.

My dad periodically asks why he can’t move in with my husband and I.   Frankly?  I don’t want to provide day-to-day care for him.  I distanced myself for my emotional safety.   I wouldn’t want him as a roommate, much less as a semi-disabled adult I’m caring for.  My emotions are tangled on this, but my want is for him to live happily ever after … without needing me.

Thankful Thursday

[an occasional exercise in gratitude]

1. Sherlock is on Netflix instant streaming.
2. A mild summer.
3. My new dress (this, size H, in blue) fits great, is nice and cool, and has pockets.
4. My father and his new care home appear to be getting along.
5. I am getting enough sleep and my anxiety is decreasing.
6. Next weekend will be three days thanks to Labor Day.

Hope this finds you well.

Photo by jcolman on flickr

Thankful Thursday

[An occasional exercise in gratitude.]

At the moment I’m thankful for:

1. My temp gig is continuing to go fairly well.
2. My father is doing better.
3. I got over my “but things can’t get better” thinking and saw my ARNP about my anxiety, insomnia, and depression symptoms.  My ARNP prescribed Celexa (for depression) and Ambien (for insomnia).
4. Ambien does help me sleep.  Celexa does seem to help my depression.
5. I am continuing to do other things to take care of myself.
6. The man of the house loves me.
7. Our friends are also supportive and helpful.

Overall: my life is not perfect. My life is not terrible.  I am coping — sometimes day by day, sometimes minute by minute, but coping.

How’s y’all?

US Obesity Rates Level Off Again?

Oh, not again.  Still.  They’ve been level for years, but this time the Journal of the American Medical Association noticed. There’s discussion as to why, such as “people are getting healthier”.  Given how dieters often gain weight in the long term, I thought this perspective a bit more realistic:

Dr. Ludwig said the plateau might just suggest that “we’ve reached a biological limit” to how obese people could get. When people eat more, he said, at first they gain weight; then a growing share of the calories go “into maintaining and moving around that excess tissue,” he continued, so that “a population doesn’t keep getting heavier and heavier indefinitely.”

That’s not what my mother told me.  She was convinced that if I wasn’t actively dieting I would continue to gain weight for the rest of my life.  Yet when I finally quit dieting my weight … leveled off.  Huh.

Furthermore, Dr. Ludwig said, “it could be that most of the people who are genetically susceptible, or susceptible for psychological or behavioral reasons, have already become obese.”

Gee, y’think?

“In My Day…”

Today’s Pickles is, of course, meant to be funny.  But for me it dredges up memories of my mother’s anger whenever I didn’t “appreciate” anything to her satisfaction, from getting to go to school to having my own room* to crying because of an earache despite having actual medication for it.  And my guilt over having things my mother didn’t.

Looking back, I wonder if she intended to slap on guilt with a trowel or if she was just expressing her own pain and not caring how I took it.

I first saw Bill Cosby’s classic video Himself as a teenager, and, oddly enough, I found it proportion-making. “The man ate dirt til he was 30 years old. That’s all there was, was dirt. And he was thankful to get it.”

Odd how both are mining the same comedic vein, but one brings me laughter and the other doesn’t.

*Mom had two older sisters. I was an only child.  Wonder why she shared her bedroom and I didn’t?

Hosting Thanksgiving? Tips to reduce stress

Okay, this is kind of US-centric, but The Onion posted some funny tips to make hosting a family Thanksgiving less stressful, including:

• Put the adults at the kids’ table, and keep the kids in the car.
• To keep your mother happy, seat her directly across from her one good child who actually did something with his life.
• Never host Thanksgiving

Some other options:

• Tell everyone you’re Canadian and already celebrated.
• Invite friends who you know well, but your parents don’t.  This may put your parents into “company manners” mode.
• Leave.  ”Love to come, Mom, but we lucked into a great deal in [remote location]“.   For example, Loscon.
• Watch Home for the Holidays.

What are your Thanksgiving/family holiday rituals?   Do you have other silly or practical coping mechanisms to share?

Exercise and Reinforcing Spirals

I’ve written about my mother being self-conscious about her fat. Afraid of other people thinking she was fat, afraid of not being able to walk far enough, of not being able to find a chair that fit, of being unable to defend herself if physically attacked. Mom was also self-conscious of being out of shape and having an “ignorant-sounding” accent.*

Mom broke her leg when I was 10. She was 45. Spending months with her left leg in a cast from hip to toes probably atrophied some muscles. I quickly learned to tighten my core muscles so I could help her up off the couch without hurting my back. I don’t recall Mom doing physical therapy when the cast got off; I do recall that after that year she gardened less, walked less, and generally seemed less active.  Arthritis seemed to bother her more; her back pain became more severe.  She began to see a chiropractor regularly.

A few years after the cast came off that Mom’s best friend, who she’d routinely gone shopping and to lunch with, ended up moving away due to a divorce.  During prior summers Mom and her best friend would load up kids, coolers, blankets, towels, and so forth and take us off to one of the local parks most every day.  Without her friend, though, Mom decided the park was too crowded. Wrangling kids and a cooler and blankets and towels and so forth around a park may not have been all that much activity, but it’s certainly functional fitness.

By the time I was 15 or 16 I was doing all the Christmas shopping so that Mom could “avoid the crowds” at the mall; a few years later Mom confessed that she didn’t think she could walk the length of the mall anymore.  I carried a pillow into movies so she could sit more comfortably, offered my arm for support when Mom climbed stairs, or pulled her up if she were on a low seat or the floor. This continued through college, until I moved out. I was 25 then; Mom was 59.

How much of her back and leg pain was due to injuries and arthritis, and how much was due to muscles that weren’t strong enough to work effectively?  I don’t know. I do think she had a reinforcing negative spiral: she exercised less because she felt out of shape; she became more out of shape because she exercised less.

I do know that I developed a self-image of myself as strong and capable due to spending my teen years in my self-appointed role as Mom’s caretaker.  I know that part of why I was frightened by injuring my knee was “I don’t have mobility problems, Mom does“.    And I know that one of my motivations to exercise is because it may not let me avoid my mother’s problems — but I’m fairly sure that NOT exercising would make me repeat them.

---

*Southern accents weren’t exactly “in” during the 70s in Seattle. One speech therapist blamed my lisp on Mom’s tendency to add “r”s to things like “warsh” and “Warshington”. Funny how Mom didn’t have a lisp, and mine went away with orthodontia and practice.

 

Things to Read

From Marianne Kirby at The Rotund:

FA represents a long chain of people coming to the realization that the diet roller coaster is, to mix my metaphors, a sucker bet. The diet industry – when you get down to the bare, capitalist bones of it – has quite a lot of profit to be made from making people, especially women, feel awful about their bodies and their weight. If we all felt awesome about ourselves, they would go out of business.

From Nudemuse on some recent posts about fat and feminism:

[T]here seems to be some gap in a lot of feminist thought when it comes to granting fat women the same agency they might give to a woman who wants to do something else with her body.
[...]
No one likes being told, hey you might enjoy bread but you can’t have any because I think it would be best for you.

Now, I don’t know about you folks but my first reaction to that kind of condescension is to say, oh really, okay fuck you.

Maybe people with this mind set are trying to come from a loving place. If you are trying to come from a loving place think about it this way; if it was your life your body how would you feel about some stranger telling you what’s good for you in this manner? If it would upset you, don’t fucking say it.

And April at Round is a Shape on setting a boundary with her mother:

One phrase that I uttered early on in the day when my mother started to bemoan the fact that she was so hungry (after an early morning and only a granola bar she was feeling guilty for daring to feel famished by noon after driving 1.5 hours to see us!) and relay her guilt about going for a piece of bread or another pierogi: “This home is free of food judgments”.  And, happily, this was the last of self-recriminations that we really heard or voiced all day.

:)

Mother’s Day

As the Mother’s Day ads have passed, I am relieved to say that it wasn’t a hassle.  If anything, I alternated between vague feeling of “It’s not my problem” and “I don’t have to do anything”.

If you don’t already know: I am not a mother; my mother is dead; my grandmothers are dead.  I did not have to do anything for this holiday, and in fact I did not.   Nor did I feel renewed grief or regret over my mother’s or grandmother’s deaths.  If anything, it was nice to sit this holiday out.

This is not meant as a slam on those who happily celebrate Mother’s Day, or a reminder that “If you don’t appreciate your mother now you’ll regret it when she’s gone”, or other such crap.  I’m just glad to be a point where every single mention of Mother’s Day doesn’t always and immediately plunge me into reflections of my mom.

Random Items from My Day

1. Still here.  Still weigh the same as I did before the holidays.
   (That’s simply a fact, BTW, not a success or failure.  But it’s not what people expect, even though it’s incredibly average.)
2. Excerpt from IM:

Me: My dad called just as Good Eats started today.  It was an episode on Alton’s recent weight loss and how he switched from a “calorie-dense” diet to a “nutrient-dense” diet (which of course is not a diet).

Me: …Dad and I had a nice chat.

Friend: Hee.

3. Today I was once again reminded that for all my bitching about having a sedentary job, I walk much more at work than at home because things are further apart.
4. I liked this blog from Tara Parker-Pope: New Health Rule: Quit Worrying About Your Health.  It’s pretty much aimed at the “worried well” — those who are physically fine but worried that because they don’t eat blueberries enough or that they wake up after 7 hours of sleep instead of 8 they’re going to die — and discusses a book by Dr Susan Love which asserts “that perfect health is a myth and that most of us are living far more healthful lives than we realize.”   Nice idea, but I’m not sure we need more rules – other than the big ones, of course.

Oprah Online: Article on fat acceptance

The Oprah magazine article I posted about earlier, by (mother) Robin Marantz Henig and (daughter) Jess Zimmerman, is online now.   So far the comments are good too, but there’s only two of them, so I’d be cautious anyway.

Oprah Mag printed the words “fat acceptance”

Yeah, I’m kind of in shock too.

It’s in the December 2009 issue. The Fat Fight in the “Connections” section, by Robin Marantz Henig and Jess Zimmerman.   Actually it’s a pair of articles: the first is by the mother, Henig; the second is by the daughter, Zimmerman.

Henig discusses how she tried to be “supportive” of her daughter so she wouldn’t grow up fat, but notes that  ”Of course, that’s exactly what I did: create a problem where there was none.”

Meals soon became a battleground.  [...] And when Jessie asked for seconds, I’d say, “Are you really hungry?” I thought that sounded supportive. I see now how harsh it was. If she asked for food, she was hungry. I should at least have trusted her to know her own body’s cues.

Describing a “tantrum” in the dermatologists’s office during Zimmerman’s early teens, Henig states,

I was mystifiied. I didn’t see that this doctor visit was, to Jessie, yet another indication that my love was conditional. She thought I loved her only when she was clear-skinned and slim.

On the one hand, Henig’s puzzlement seems genuine; on the other, I can’t help but wonder how she expected anything else.  Yes, people joke that parents worry and kids to feel they can’t measure up and it’s not real — except when it is.

In her article, Zimmerman states,

It’s difficult for a child to differentiate between someone who wants to armor her against an unjust world and someone who thinks that she’s damaged.

Most parents would claim to be wanting to do the former — but that doesn’t always mean they don’t feel the latter.  It’s a message our culture screams from the rooftops; many, many parents of fat kids pick up on it too.  Children may not want to believe their parent is rejecting them…but if the parent repeats it often enough over the years, it’ll break through the denial.

In college, Zimmerman discovered new ideas, among them fat acceptance.

Sophomore year, Mom wrote an article tut-tutting about how the people on campus who told me to “honor my hunger” were only ruining my diet.  I ran a campus-wide campaign for Love Your Body Day and asked Mom to quit writing about me.

At 27, Zimmerman sent Henig a pointer to Joy Nash’s Fat Rant video, which led to more discussion between her and her mother.  Henig began researching fat acceptance, realizing it works for Zimmerman and her fiance.   Zimmerman puts it:

These days I can write about my body — and even, cautiously, let my mother write about it — because I’ve jettisoned the old narratives and started to scratch out a new one. It’s a complicated story, with an unpredictable plot — good days, bad days, a pervasive sense of shame that’s hard to shake. But I’m finding that the main character is much more healthy, stable, and worthwhile than I’d ever known.

---

Related: This article on health at every size quotes Jessica Zimmerman on her experiences with dieting, disordered eating, and HAES.